Collective Memory and Remembrance of the Great War

Aaron Russo

2/1/2016

HON 350

Professor Beiriger

Collective Memory and Remembrance of the Great War

“Remembrance follows conflict, as night follows day”

— Jay Winter

Memory is the means through which we reflect on the past and project into the future. Although it is often considered to be deeply personal, memory, as argued by many philosophers and historians, is an abstract term that comprises three sub-forms: individual or autobiographical, historical and collective.

Individual memory is the purest form of remembering in relation to a single person reflecting upon his own past. However, Maurice Halbwachs and others assert that individual memory rarely exists in an unadulterated form, though this is often unknown to the individual due to the individual’s “yield without struggle to an external suggestion.” Instead, individual memory is almost always influenced by a number of outside factors and thus a blend of individual and social dynamics. The varying social environments that influence the memories of the thinker are called “milieus” by Halbwachs. Memory influenced by such externalities is known as “collective memory,” a term introduced by Halbwachs in the first half of the 20th century. Halbwachs summarizes collective memory as a “current of continuous thought whose continuity is not at all artificial, for it retains from the past only what still lives or is capable of living in the consciousness of the groups keeping the memory alive” (Olick 142-143). Collective memory is therefore a social construct influenced by a number of factors that is morphed by the individuals or group to which it applies and from whom it originated. It is objective in the sense that it is constantly reshaped by external factors but is also subjective and deeply internal in the way these externalities react in the mind of the thinker.

Although the memory being reflected is most often social or collective, it is up to the individual, or “Mr. Everyman” as Carl Becker...